Running with Scissors

Directed by Ryan Murphy

Running with Scissors lives up to its cringe-inducing title. This adaptation of the memoir by Augusten Burroughs displays the worst elements of popular gay cinema. It flaunts psychosis and emotional violence as opposed to good gay cinema (Broken Sky, Infamous, Shortbus), which is based in the sensitive portrayal of human struggle. Burroughs’ florid memory of growing up as an abused child (implicitly the universal gay condition) carries an air of resentment and director/writer Ryan Murphy adds the presumption of entitlement. 

Every character except Burroughs (who ages from childhood to adolescence) is a villain. Young Burroughs is doomed from the moment he is subjected to his ambitious mother’s literary/celebrity aspirations. He’s forced to be the private audience to her amateur poetry readings. This arch exhibitionism looks like a modern variation on Auntie Mame except here, Mommy Mame is an arrogant, pill-popping, psychological cripple; she drives her husband to drink and causes her son to be an invert. Each outrageous character in Running with Scissors made me think back on the way Carson McCullers compassionately dealt with both adolescent misery and adult pathos in A Member of the Wedding. But here, compassion is shown only through humor that takes the nasty form of ridicule.

Nothing in Running with Scissors is credible. We know it’s all a formula because this year’s earlier book-to-film debacle, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, exposed the ridicule-and-pathos routine as a JT Leroy stunt. In this depraved branch of literature, the warping of a boy’s mind is sentimentalized; it makes defenseless gay stoicism a subject customized for bestseller lists. Quite a decline from the pre-Stonewall era when artists like Baldwin, McCullers, Williams, Capote and Inge wrote books, plays and movies, proving that they knew more about the world—and more about heartache—than most heterosexual mainstream artists. Today, too many gay pop artists flaunt their resentment of the hetero status quo; they’ve self-righteously established a new, untrustworthy status quo. 

Without its “based on factual events” deception, Running with Scissors could be a Halloween horror movie. Murphy employs sarcasm about his characters’ dilemmas, using jokes about narcotics addiction, alcoholism, sexual humiliation and religious hysteria. The cast consists of howling ghouls: A castrating mother (Annette Bening), an indifferent father (Alec Baldwin), a pathological quack-psychiatrist (Brian Cox), a suicidal first lover (Joseph Fiennes), varieties of masochistic fag hags (Jill Clayburgh, Evan Rachel Wood, Gwyneth Paltrow) and, of course, an innocent gay boy protagonist (Joseph Cross)—who will grow up to be a writer with a jackpot movie deal. Oh, Brandon de Wilde, where art thou now?

Running with Scissors resounds with echoes of this reproachful new pop genre. Michael Cunningham, the patron saint of this literary hoax, can be felt in the film’s resemblance to the gynephobia of The Hours and the coming-of-age gloom of A Home At the End of the World, which then links with the suburban cynicism of American Beauty, the self- pity of Tarnation, the grotesquerie of Mysterious Skin and the sexual hatred of Little Children. This is what passes for intelligent “adult” filmmaking in a culture that rejected the exuberant, imaginative, healing humanism of Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto. (Plus, it’s guaranteed Oscar bait: Every Bening scene is a mad scene but only Clayburgh and Woods achieve the fragility of human pain.)

It has to be noted that Murphy’s distillation of Burrough’s plot closely resembles Morrissey’s song “The Father Who Must Be Killed” but with none of the elegance or intelligence. In that stunning, unfunny cry against abuse, Morrissey wasn’t on a vindictive Oedipal kick; he condensed a personal tragedy into an emotional epic that radiated pathos for all: “Just as motherless birds fly high/So shall I.” That ingenious last phrase, a homonym for the “Social I,” takes the song to Baldwin/McCullers heights. It exposes Burroughs and Murphy to be pikers.